RICHARD LINDNER (German/American /
1901-1978)

Richard Lindner was born in Hamburg, into a Jewish family. He started out as a concert pianist, before training as an artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His first break came when Bertolt Brecht noticed his work and asked him to paint the stage sets for The Threepenny Opera. In 1929 Richard Lindner became art director of the publishing house of Knorr and Hir in Munich. Lindner remembered, "I saw Hitler every day in Munich at the Café Heck, a small café with about ten tables and thirty seats... Hitler used to sit there every day at his usual table. Our table was beside his and we knew each other because we avoided direct contact... He always wanted to be with artists." The day Hitler came to power, Lindner left for Paris, where he associated with Picasso, Gertrude Stein and her circle. After the fall of France, Lindner fled to the USA, becoming an American citizen in 1948. In America, Richard Linder was friendly with other artistic exiles, such as Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp, and with other German emigrés such as Kurt Weill, Marlene Dietrich, Josef von Sternberg, and Albert Einstein. From 1952-1965 Richard Lindner taught a course on "Creative Expressionism" at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Lindner's work may be considered the bridge between Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop Art.